Imagine for a moment a world without crimes. Sounds like something right out of the movie ‘Minority Report’ right? This movie starring Tom Cruise looks into the not so distant future 2054 A.D. when crime is virtually eliminated, thanks to an elite law enforcing squad called “Precrime”. They did this using three gifted humans (called “Pre-Cogs”) that have special powers who see into the future and predict crimes before they happen. [1] Even my favorite show Person of Interest plays into this obsession. For those who haven not seen this show it’s about “The Machine”- a futuristic man made system used to predict violent acts through analyzing various government agency feeds, combined with data collected from various other sources, including video footage, phone calls,GPS, electronic transactions, e-mail, and social media helps its inventor to stop crime before it actually happens.[2] Please take a look. Yes these are fictional representations, however they are not a far stretch of what is actually happening today. Are we really living in a police state where big brother is watching our every move? This blog will highlight some of the technologies used by police forces around the world,, and like it or not they are accessing your social media posts to do so. “Big Brother is Watching You.” ― George Orwell, 1984 Researching this topic I have learnt that countries around the world are adopting technologies and software to further their pursuit to stop crimes before they happen. These proprietary systems are using public data though various social networks and running it through their algorithms to detect possible threats. Recently, there has been a huge wave of organizations predictive software. The new approach to policing is that it has shifted from being good at reacting to crime to becoming better at predicting it. Here are just a few examples of technologies out there that are providing new arsenal for policing around the globe. Honestly, I am not so convinced that these types of artificial intelligence systems can formulate an opinion about a person based on what they post on Facebook, I guess you can draw your own conclusions.